Terror snub for Britain

America poured scorn last night on British concerns over the treatment of Al Qaeda suspects in Cuba.

Hard-line Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed claims that they should be treated like prisoners of war.

'They are terrorists,' he declared on a visit to the notorious Camp X-Ray in Cuba.

His uncompromising stance will place serious strains on the relationship between London and Washington.

And a Republican senator accompanying him went even further, lambasting British MPs who have accused the Americans of human rights abuses at the camp.

Mr Rumsfeld made it clear that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's call for three British suspects to be returned to Britain for trial would be considered only once they had been picked clean of any intelligence information.

Asked whether they would be viewed differently from the other detainees at the camp, he said: 'No, they will not receive any special treatment.'

Mr Rumsfeld's intervention came as it emerged that two Britons from the same West Midlands town were being held in Camp X-Ray.

Shafiq Rasul, 24, and Asif Iqbal, 20, both from Tipton, were taken to Cuba after A discomfited Duke of York and a masked reveller at a Chinese New Year party in London being captured in northern Afghanistan. Touring the camp where both Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects have been locked up in small, wire-mesh cells that are open to the elements, the Defence Secretary was unyielding.

Quoting the Geneva Convention, Mr Rumsfeld said that the only reason for a tribunal to have to assess the status of the prisoners under the terms of the Convention would be if there was any ambiguity about their status as unlawful combatants.

'There is no ambiguity. These men are not prisoners of war. They did not wear uniforms. They did not carry insignia. They are terrorists.'

Mr Straw last week said that the three British detainees at Camp X-Ray should be returned to this country to face justice.

Mr Rumsfeld questioned whether the Foreign Secretary was the ' appropriate person' to be making such a demand before declaring: 'We would need to be sure that we could obtain no further intelligence from the detainees before we could release them to another country.

'We would also want a guarantee from Britain that any intelligence they obtained would be shared with the United States.'

That remark will raise hackles in London given that the UK prides itself on its intimate intelligence relationship with the U. S.

The GCHQ listening post at Cheltenham provides the Americans with invaluable information from the Middle East. Accompanying Mr Rumsfeld, Senator Ted Stevens was even less diplomatic.

'The British Parliamentarians did a great disservice to the brave American servicewomen and men at this camp,' he said.

'I would like to drag some of them down here to see that these terrorists who struck at our country are being given better treatment than ordinary prisoners anywhere in the world.'

Mr Stevens, who sits on the Senate's influential Armed Services Committee, said the statements from MPs could have provoked an outburst of violence at the camp.

'These are the kind of inflammatory statements which could persuade others to act against the U.S. or its allies,' he said. 'They were irresponsible and misinformed and just plain wrong.'

Beside him, Mr Rumsfeld had remained calm and affable in the searing heat of Cuba until he was asked if he was satisfied with the cages where the prisoners were kept.

'There are not cages,' he barked. 'I can't understand why anyone would want to inflame others who are America's enemies by calling them cages. I never want to hear that again.'

Despite Mr Rumsfeld's uncompromising stance, President Bush faces a growing split within his cabinet over the treatment of prisoners at Camp X-Ray.

He will meet his National Security Council today following calls by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a leaked White House memo, for the prisoners to be given full and formal protection under the 1948 Geneva Convention.